All pictures are of the actual truck.
Having a camper was (and is) a lot of fun. We were hauling our new Coleman popup with our 1998 Dakota, but when my friend decided to upgrade to a newish Cadillac CTS wagon, he offered me his Yukon at a good price. Having known the truck, it was a no-brainer to buy.
Aside from the ’67-’72 trucks, these GMT-400’s were my favourite trucks. To me, they seemed to be a well-made, refined truck, but comfortable like a car. The styling was pretty good, too. This particular Yukon was a SLT, which I believe gave one leather bucket seats, and an overhead console. It was pretty nice.
I replaced the buckets and console with a split bench.
Everything was laid out sensibly, and felt reasonably well-made. The front seats, though had a weird crown in the middle, and were hard on the back. I was lucky enough to get a split bench to fit it, and put it in. Much better!
Powering the whole affair was the Vortec 350 and 4L60E. Having 150,000 KM when I got it, it wasn’t high mileage, but had some issues over the years. The intake manifold gaskets were done before I got it, and it also was hard on distributor caps. After the caps would get a year or two old, the truck would start misfiring to the point that it wouldn’t go.
The bane of the Vortec’s ignition system.
The distributor cap was of a design that would allow all of the left side plug wires to connect to the left side of the cap, and vice versa. To do this, the conductors ran inside the plastic cap housing to the proper side. After a while of being exposed to high voltage, I suspect the insulation would break down where the conductors were close, and it would misfire. It was a pretty kludgy setup. A new cap would always clear it up.
Other than that, it had a few little issues. The transmission would start shifting harshly once it would get hot, so I replaced it before it failed. The front ABS sensors had failed, and required replacing the whole bearing, despite the fact they weren’t bad. The bearing had turned enough in the housing that it damaged the sensors. No wonder I couldn’t get the old sensors out. The brakes weren’t great either, only becoming marginal with the installation of a set of EBC pads and a new set of rotors in front.
Beautiful New Glasgow Highlands campground in PEI.
With the truck being in nice shape, we started venturing further and further afield. We went to PEI and New Brunswick a few times with the Coleman, but with a young daughter, we found it to be too much work setting up and taking down. With the Canadian dollar at par, we and my parents planned a two-week summer vacation trip to Maine and New Hampshire. A better option was needed.
The new-to-us camper.
We found a nice, pre-owned travel trailer in Shediac, NB. It was early May, and with the Yukon down for a transmission replacement, we borrowed my father-in-law’s 2009 F-150 to get it. Once the new transmission was put in, I installed a transmission temperature gauge to make sure I didn’t exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We did a few long weekend camping trips with the Yukon, and learned some things. You couldn’t tow in Overdrive on anything but flat land, and there’s not much flat land here. The torque converter would unlock and the transmission temperature would spike. Leaving it in Drive allowed the torque to stay locked and stay cool, but rev at 2500-3000 RPM on the highway. The end result was fuel economy around 8 MPG, and with gas at the time being over $1.30 per litre, it was an expensive proposition. At the best of times, it would get 16 MPG. Not great, but what you’d expect with one of these.
Powderhorn Campground, Old Orchard Beach, ME
Mom and Dad took their 1938 Ford. It’s been modernized, with a 305 V8 and automatic transmission. Dad commented on it being a bit lazy on the trip, but around Bangor, it died on the side of I-95. The fuel pump had died. Thank God for CAA – one call, and they towed it to their hotel, which luckily had a auto parts store nearby, and a new pump was installed. It ran, but didn’t sound all that good. I could hear a snapping noise at idle. A quick look showed why – one plug wire had burnt on the exhaust manifold, and the other one had wrapped around the steering shaft and pulled the plug wire out of the boot. A new set of wires and it was back to its old self. The Yukon didn’t give any trouble at all.
On Mount Washington.
All in all, the Yukon was a pretty good truck. It had some issues, but nothing earth-shattering. I got rid of it as well as the car I had at the time to downsize to one vehicle, instead of having one for pulling the camper, and one for everything else. I do miss it, though.
At one point, my grandfather had one of these two-door GMT400s. I believe it was a ’98 Tahoe, green over beige with leather interior and bucket seats.
Seems like a great truck. For me they are the sweet spot where styling was still crisp and conservative but the interiors had become more comfortable and better looking. Especially the dash. Solid mechanicals too, except for the odd thing here and there. But that’s GM. That distributor cap design is a malfunction waiting to happen and should be made with extreme quality, which it apparently isn’t. The split bench looks great in there, too. Your Yukon serves your family well and it looks like you have some fun adventures with it.
I will join the chorus of GMT400 fans. I never owned one but they were positively everywhere around me.
My one question was why anyone would want the TahoeYukon because it gave you almost all the disadvantages of the larger Suburban (wide and thirsty) without the payoff (all that extra room). My sister and BIL bought one to replace an XJ Cherokee and it was not long before they traded it for a Suburban.
But then it must have been the right size for many because GM sure sold a lot of them.
Having had a 4-door Tahoe of this vintage, I think the Tahoe/Yukon was cavernous “enough” for most families with two kids that didn’t really need the third row – which didn’t fold into the floor back then either so took up a lot of that space – A three row Suburban has similar space after the last row compared to a 2-row Tahoe/Yukon. Unless you got the barn door rear option, it was already difficult to actually reach stuff in the back without an, as Scoutdude so eloquently put it a couple of weeks ago, “old man hook”. The 4door Tahoe/Yukon also had a different rear suspension than the Suburban, which apparently made it handle and ride better.
The other aspect is just the length, exactly the attribute you focused on, unless really needed, in many suburbs and urban areas the Suburban is just a bridge too far, making it MUCH more difficult to park and maneuver in tighter spots or smaller garages. Not a huge problem where you are but think of SF, LA, east coast etc. Not that people didn’t buy a lot of Suburbans there (they did and do) but the shorter version really opened up a whole new market for GM where they were more or less on par with other larger, wider (but not hugely long) SUV’s such as Land Cruiser etc.
“I think the Tahoe/Yukon was cavernous “enough” for most families with two kids that didn’t really need the third row”
Soooo, your children had no friends? 🙂
Yes, I get that for many folks the size of the Suburban could be intimidating and maybe just not needed. But I guess I am just a “most room for the money” kind of guy, which was why I opted for the Club Wagon van instead of the Suburban. Actually a Burban would have added some seating space over the 7 seats in my van, and that 8th seat would have come in handy on many occasions. Maybe that was why every one of my kids’ aunts and uncles (that had families, at least) owned a Suburban during that time of life. Hell, one of those families actually owned two. Boy did they get funny looks when they moved from Texas to suburban Philly.
We also had a Toyota Sienna at this time so had that need covered 🙂 But really, the number of times that we carried more than ONE friend at a time along with ALL of us was relatively minimal. Certainly not enough to deal with the length of a Suburban in the Bay Area / Our garage / Our driveway every day.
You know, it strikes me every time I go back – while huge pickups are all over the place here, there are comparatively fewer of them (on a percentage basis) roaming San Francisco and the Orange County area. Not that they aren’t there but there are WAY less of the crewcab extended bed versions. Lots of single cabs (mainly workers), definitely crewcabs but mostly with the shorter(est) bed. Very few 2500 Crewcab long beds and almost zero duallies. I have to believe this is simply due to space limitations. Same thing with Suburban vs Yukon/Tahoe. Sometimes an extra foot or two is a deal breaker. I’m just trying to explain my answer as to why one might choose this shorter version.
Oh, I do understand. I do not doubt that there are some major lifestyle differences between the big coastal cities and the midwest, many of which come down to space. And going from a family of 4 (you) to a family of 5 (me) makes a huge difference in the universe of vehicles one can consider. I was always a little jealous of your 4-seat people because your choices were so much wider. I, for example, could have scored that orange 5 speed Element (with non-rusting plastic body panels) 🙂
We are a family of five as well and have been for the last almost ten years now. Two boys, one girl 🙂 We just choose to currently have two vehicles with only four seats each among our fleet…
But yes, families of four often have NO idea how much extra that 5th person alters stuff. Cars, vacations both for rental cars, sitting together on planes, and hotels are all more complex or limiting. Even restaurants, not every place has a booth for more than four or tables set up that way…
Doh! How could I have forgotten that. This advancing age thing is becoming a problem. 😕
It’s not age, it’s probably just all the paint you’ve been huffing lately…:-)
I’m also solidly on the GMt400 bandwagon. The best GM truck ever, and I’ll argue the best all-around half ton pickup truck anyone has ever made. It hit the sweet spot of predating the worst of GM’s cost cutting, had better rust-proofing than the GMT-800s that followed, and is in the sweet spot of being fuel injected but still simple and DIY friendly. Well tuned, a Vortec 5.7 can just about nip at 18-19 mpg on the highway and has plenty of grunt for towing and hauling. On top of all that, I think they are gorgeous. Masculine without being contrived or try-hard, simple and strong lines. My brother and I helped a friend re-animate a ’98 K1500 (305, 4wd, auto) that had been dormant in his driveway for a few years, a new alternator, battery, and power steering line (all in stock at Autozone) and it was back in action. A bit of a wash and chrome polish and it looked great.
I still see them all over the place as daily drivers and weekend haulers, and would love to find a clean one for myself at some point when the need arises.
Nice truck and write-up Marc. I also favour the 67-80 and GMT-400 trucks. The GMT-400s seemed to have had a following for sometime and command premium prices when in great shape. I predict they will be probably the most collectible of the modern trucks.
The vortec engines seemed lightyears ahead of the TBI engines when it came to performance, but the reliability was not as good. We used to have issues with ignition systems, inake gaskets, the poppet valves for the convoluted fuel injection and of course fuel pumps. GM half assed the MPFI on these to save a few bucks and they had all kinds of issues as a result. The 454s got a decent setup though. In the end none of it was hard to fix though, but it could have been so much better for a little extra effort.
I agree with you 100% on the convoluted fuel injection. Why on earth did they come up with this system ( 2 piece intake manifold, poppet nozzle as well as electrical injectors plus interconnecting plastic lines) when they could have used the excellent TPI system that debuted on the 1985 IROC Z28?
Nice truck, and I agree, the most handsome era for them.
But, sigh…. I guess I am getting really From-The-Last-Century old. I look at that distributor, and, intellectually, I can understand it, but it just seems so wrong.
I can grasp that a distributor doesn’t need to be round once you abandon a spinning rotor, and that because you are using a single coil, you need some sort of distribution system but this snakes-on-a-plate design just seems … weird.
From the looks of it, I suspect that the guy responsible for the infamous plastic intake manifold got reassigned to something he couldn’t screw up i.e. designing distributors – which have a full century of design work behind them – and he came up with this.
I wonder where he got reassigned after this?
Maybe he designed the ignition switch for the early Cobalts. (Too soon?)
MotorWeek just posted their launch road test of the GMT400, a 1500 longbed pickup with the 4.3 V6.
Awesome! First generation that they built in Ft Wayne Indiana. My in laws live a few miles away from the factory and have neighbors where both husband and wife are GM employees at the plant. They have a GMT900 Yukon, and a trusty red long bed W/T GMT400 sitting in the driveway, ready for weekend hauling. My brother was just up at the plant installling some prognostic equipment to boot.
I remember when they built that plant in the mid-late 80s. It is hard to overstate how much that plant helped that area, which had spent much of the prior decade losing big industrial employers (like International Harvester).
Sadly, Ft Wayne Assembly is perhaps one of the last plants standing in that I69 corridor, Anderson in particular got gutted.
I enjoyed that. Thank you!
That final incarnation of the Gen 1 SBC, with its Vortec heads and roller cam, was a great runner. Hot Rod tested the Vortec heads and found them to deliver superior flow over Edelbrock’s Performer series and other street-use aftermarket heads.
But the issues with the distributor cap and upper intake manifold were shared with the 4.3 W-series V6. If you were aware of those issues and fixed them when they came up, these trucks were as good as it got back then.
4L60Es are notoriously weak, but towing in overdrive does you no favors.
But i’ve toasted a transmission before; que sera, sera.
I too am a fan of the GMT400 lines. Ever since seeing the customized Suburban from the Sopranos, I was always a fan of these big trucks. If I ever wanted an SUV or Pickup truck, these would be some of my first candidates I would look at.
T400 and T800 are very good trucks. Each have there low spots but what vehicle is perfect? I know a fiew people that put many miles on them 200k to 300k miles.
A 1994 5-speed stick Yukon GT is my current daily driver. I’ve always been a fan of the GMT400 and the big two door was just irresistible especially with the manual transmission. I can get about 15-16 mpg mostly country two lanes but some mixed driving with the TBI 350.
While it is a convoluted distributor cap your root problem was low quality parts that you get when you go to the consumer grade parts store and just ask for a distributor cap. Go to NAPA and ask for the premium one, or get a genuine GM part and it will last 10 years or more. Yes you’ll pay twice as much but since it will last 5 times as long it is a much better value. The problem is the same with the earlier cap with the standard posts that stick up straight. The plastic is not very dense or thick and the low grade aluminum corrodes. The quality part will easily tip the scales at twice the weight thanks to the thick dense plastic and brass contacts.
They STILL had the 2-door models in 1998?! I had no idea they were made that long; I thought they went away when the Tahoe came out in 1995 to replace the K5 Blazer (the Yukon had replaced the K5 Jimmy in 1992 but was still 2-door only). Being a Ford guy, I have no first-hand experience with any of these trucks but have to agree with others here that the GMT-400 generation was & still is the zenith of GM’s truck design, back when SUVs were still SUVs & not just glorified soccer mom mobiles. Yes, technological advancements have made later generations better on gas & more family-friendly, but how many of them are actually used for their traditional purpose? Only occasionally do I ever see them actually towing big trailers on the highway or having obviously been used on a recent off-road expedition.
I looked briefly at this gen Tahoe before we bought our FZJ80 Land Cruiser. I didn’t drive one until a few years later, my sister-in-law’s, and remember good power, comfortable seats, and simply terrible brakes compared to the Toyota.
On a given month, I drive 2500 km, in city traffic. If I were to drive something like this, I would go broke. At 8 mpg towing your trailer, you could stay in a five star resort every night at $1.30 a litre. It works out to $191 to travel 500 km.
Undoubtedly that’s the case. But traveling in this manner is a totally different experience, it feels more free. Home is where you make it, and in this case it’s everywhere you go.